Leopard Dreaming (49 page)

She shook her head again. ‘I don’t understand.’

‘I know how to fix us — how to set the whole world straight again, on the right tracks.’ He peeled back the bed sheets cautiously. ‘Through our deaths.’

‘Through our
what
?’

He helped her to sit up and swing her legs over the edge of the bed.

Barefoot, her toes dangled briefly in the cool air.

The room, in all its shades of black and white, made no sense to her. It appeared to be the bombed-out ruins of an old medical ward, where time had provided the slow fuse and explosion of dust. Spiders littered the blast zone with cobwebs and the bodies of other arachnids and insects. A row of steel gurneys lined the far wall, with a barrel of bandages in one corner, where dusty footprints suggested she hadn’t been the first to notice it. Four doors on each wall met with thicker trails, same as the other rooms she’d seen so
far — also suggesting the facility provided a maze of rooms as well as corridors.

‘It’s not too late,’ he whispered far too near to her ear. ‘To apologise for all I’ve put you through?’

‘You’re kidding.’ She blinked at him, still unsure if he was even real.

His smile stayed in place as he brought her hands up to his face, where she also felt her hallucination of him solidify. Her foggy brain took a moment longer to register, while her curious fingers explored the shape of his head, and she read a depth of sincerity that she’d never imagined possible for him.

He wiped a falling tear from her cheek and drew it down in a line on his own face as if he’d cried it himself.

‘Here is the place we must atone for our sins.’

‘
Your
sins,’ she argued. ‘I’m innocent.’

‘No, child.’ He patted her hand. ‘You’re the seed of all this. And the weed. It’s in this room, I created you.’

Lockman clambered down the elevator shaft, grappling through a tangle of thick metal cables until he finally found bottom.

Infrared illumination permitted him to see a square concrete tunnel that headed due south, but he needed more details. Switching to Peeping Tom mode didn’t help much though, since tree roots were the only other feature in every direction for a depth of roughly ten metres.

He set the mode for ultraviolet and startled at the sight of scorpions glowing pale green on the walls around him. Thousands of them. Few bigger than a cockroach, but all had their tails pointed in the same direction like anti-compasses, as if they’d all been driven north in the tunnel by noise or vibration. Most scuttled into crevices as he moved towards them, while the smallest reared aggressively — almost comically,
since he knew the Australian bush scorpion was usually only lethal to other scorpions and insects.

Too inexperienced to recognise him as a potential predator, a juvenile dropped from the ceiling and stung his neck like a wasp.

He swept it off calmly and crushed it under his boot, causing more of them to scuttle away to safety. Again their tails all faced the same point of threat, only this time, as he turned around to assess the full circle of them, he noticed the point of threat was now him.

The thought occurred to him that they could detect movement deeper in the subterranean facility than he could with his advanced technology.

He shed his backpack, opened his med kit and emptied two tapered plastic tubes of saline solution, then collected six of the biggest and shyest by their tails and fed them into the trap which sealed effectively enough when he pushed the ends together. They couldn’t turn around or even curl their tails enough to sting each other, but he didn’t plan on keeping them confined for long. They could survive for two days without air, and he planned on setting them free long before that.

‘Welcome to the unit,’ he whispered. ‘You’ve just been recruited.’

M
ira stumbled off the gurney and teetered sideways into the corner where she landed against the barrel of bandages. Layers of dust and spider webs made them smell musty and rotten, and yet the old bald man who edged closer to her made her wish she could bury herself in them and hide forever.

He smiled at her, grimly. ‘The perfect union, they say, is a deaf man with a blind woman.’
No, wait,
he added with his hands.
That echo continues. Forget I said it. Yet.

‘You’re crazy!’ Mira cried. ‘Keep away from me.’

‘Oh, black little kettle, don’t call the pot names.’ He took a step nearer.

‘Stay back!’ She tried to run, but her jelly legs failed her. She slid one hand across the wall for better balance. Tried to edge for the door, but the strange drug kept her body sluggish and disagreeable. A cocktail that she’d never experienced; injection first then forced to swallow a tablet. They made every movement seem slow and exaggerated; caused her pupils to dilate and her teeth taste metallic. Saliva dribbled from the corner of her lip, and as she tried to wipe it, she knew
she must appear insanely comical, yet he stopped and held his distance anyway.

‘Believe your own eyes, child.’

‘Stop calling me that!’ She wiped her mouth dry with the back of her hand.

‘Would you prefer
demon seed
?’

She shook her head, preferring him as an hallucination.

‘If you will not see me for who I am, look back through time and witness the event itself, when this old room was still filled with the metal bunks of an old barracks.’

She shook all over, trembling. If it was true that she could finally see the present through her shades without pain, she didn’t dare to adjust her hues ever again — until she recalled it required drugs to achieve. Addictive drugs that she’d been forced to take.

‘Which event?’ She feared she already knew. ‘I’ve spent nights here during storms and never seen anything but solid rock and natural caverns.

‘Ho! Indeed!’ He laughed. ‘I may be old, but I’m not that old. It’s no coincidence your parents brought you down here. Most creatures travel home to spawn. The reason you never saw me as a child is because your sight with your naked eyes is fixed at six score ago, while the sin I committed to create you took place here only six decades ago.’

Mira shook her head again slowly. ‘I may be as stupid as I look right now, but I still know I’m a lot younger than sixty. There’s no way we’re related.’

‘Original sin is passed down from the father. No such thing as coincidence. Everything you are and will be is all inherited from me — down here in the bowels of the earth, where all evil begins.’

‘I don’t want to hear it!’

‘Please lower your voice. Not for me, since your echoes are already rippling over the soft end of the
sound barrier into silence. Our time alone here is short, and there is still much we must discuss if you ever wish for our beloved matron to escape with your friends.

Mira froze, horrified that sedation had made her forget, albeit briefly, why she’d come in the first place. ‘Matron Maddy? Where is she?’

He turned, and although Mira couldn’t see far through the blur of sedation, she could make out the shape of a second gurney behind him. ‘Asleep,’ he whispered, holding a finger to his lips. ‘Shhh. I tricked them into sedating her enough to last the hour. No risk of addiction, yet.’

‘You lied to them?’

‘I lie to everyone. Except you. There’s no point, child. You’d see through it.’

‘Ha!’ She wished she could laugh louder and harder. ‘You’re trying to tell me we’re related?’

‘My blood is yours. You must know it, so you tell me and I’ll read it from your lips.’

‘I am not your child! It’s impossible. You’ve never treated me as family. Not even pretended. And if you wanted me to know all this, why didn’t you tell me as soon as I transferred to Serenity?’

‘
Grand
child. I tried to shield you from the cruellest truths from my very first opportunity.’

‘No way. You’ve been locked away for six decades.’

‘The first three were not continuous. Authorities kept taking me away. My parents kept stealing me back again. If your own parents had been alive, they would have done the same for you. Aren’t you sure of it?’

Mira shrugged. She’d loved both her parents so dearly, and yet they’d taken their own lives. ‘They abandoned me. That’s why authorities took me, but why take you, if your parents both loved you?’

‘They were young. Some say foolish, others say cursed from the beginning. My father grew deaf, my
mother fell blind. The perfect union.’
No, wait, that echo ends now.
He shook his head with a frustrated growl. ‘They took comfort in each other’s arms even though they were twins. Brother and sister. Forbidden love. Original sin. And such a union can only spawn one thing. Abomination.’

Mira gaped at him, horrified. She’d seen colonials in her ghost town spurning children who’d been born out of wedlock. Her crush, Jacob Green, had been one of them. Shameful during creation perhaps by their standards, yet through birth, he’d been reborn innocent, as far as she could tell.

‘Your brother is normal,’ she argued. ‘Heartless and cruel too, obviously, but within the shades of normality in this filthy world … Does he know all this?’

‘He is only my half-brother. We share the same mother. Nothing more.’

‘Except your behaviour. Abominable acts are a choice, not pre-ordained.’

‘Try telling that to the midwife who stole me away that first night. She left me to sleep naked by an open window; a mistake left out for the angels to take. And they did. Reclaiming me, my parents swaddled me. Fed me. Retreating from town, they fled into the forest, where my father raised us into the canopy and built the first tree house. Crude, but liveable. He carved songs of love into the walls until time and termites taught me to emboss them into the branches with metal.’

‘The Poet Trees? But I thought my mother —’

‘Expanded on the idea. And so she did, as did the other misfits who stayed for a time, each adding their songs or lessons from life, after their own spurning from society. Passers-through, mostly. Rarely stayed more than a week or two. Unlike Kitching’s father, your father and his father.’

Mira slumped in the corner, attempting to process it all. Sedation made it easier to hear. Blurrier. Softer
around the edges than it should have been, but shock after shock fired her synapses, until she could think and move with recovering strength, while enough of the drug still coursed through her body to numb all her pain and rash reactions.

‘How much of this does your brother know?’

Freddie shrugged. ‘My father was dead long before he was born. Taken by a shark, while fishing for prawns.’

‘That’s why there’s twenty years between you?’

‘Sixteen and a half. He always rounds up to maximise the distance between us. For all his life he’s been ashamed of me. Pretending to be so righteous. Perhaps rightfully, to some extent. He’s the one who caught me here, plucking the petals from such a sweet bloom. Stole her cherry too, I’m ashamed to confess. It’s no excuse that I’d suffered a full summer of beatings and worse at the hands of his father. I’d become the pressure cooker, venting all my lustful frustrations at once. Until Ricky found me.’

‘Ricky?’

He nodded, already knowing the rest of her question, and yet she hesitated to ask it. In all the time she’d known Colonel Kitching, she’d never known his first name.

‘Isn’t Ricky one of your alter-egos? Icky Ricky, the baby?’

‘He prefers Rick now, if I recall, since he outgrew his tantrums, but I remember him best as a baby. A trait here, a habit there. Under stress, my memories of him personify.’

‘And he found you that day? How old was he?’

‘Fifteen, maybe sixteen. But big for his age, and his balls had dropped. He cracked me over the head with the side rail from a gurney, and rolled me outside to the old town, naked.’ His tone changed again, sounding indignant. ‘He locked me up in a chicken coop, of all
places. Left me there to catch a chill while he convinced our poor sick mother that I’d stolen eggs and time had come, finally, to have me committed permanently. And yet
his
father committed the cruellest crimes. A murderous thief, who moved in against Mother’s wishes, and made us suffer to serve him for years. I blame him for the hepatitis and cancer that took so long to kill her.’

Mira turned away, not wanting to hear any more. Years locked away with many of society’s ‘misfits’ had taught her that people who suffered dissociative personality disorders, like Freddie, had usually been subjected to the worst kind of abuse at some time during their childhood.

‘Whatever you’ve been through,’ she said, struggling to maintain her emotional distance from him, ‘it’s all in the past now. You’re not responsible for the mistakes of others. But you can make up for your own, right now, by helping me escape with Matron Maddy.’

He nodded, but she wasn’t sure to which part. He stayed silent for a long moment, as if the conversation had continued in the shadows of his mind.

‘We must die today,’ he assured her. ‘In all the permutations, in all the future echoes, there’s simply no escaping it. Your body is almost cleansed of all the medications that have suppressed your wildest hormonal fluctuations. Soon you will experience the urge to take a mate, as I did. You’ll be naturally attracted to a fellow carrier of the beastly gene. It’s the way of things. We can smell it in each other, as surely as we can judge a true blonde from a brunette. And the sins of the father, once committed, are repeated down through the generations. It’s a primal instinct.’

‘Just because it happened to you, doesn’t mean —’

‘Foolish child! The future repeats. For my parents it was love that drew them together. For me and the beautiful daughter of the drifter who’d been squatting
here, it was lust and rage that overcame me. Her only crime was to be kind to me and ask why I’d come to hide in the shadows, while that other man spent time with my mother. For you, the emotion shall be exponentially stronger. You’ll be the black widow spider, whose mates fail to survive their time with her.’

‘It’s a beastly gene, I won’t disagree. But I think you’re being a wee bit literal.’

‘Am I, truly? This fragile gene that deforms us knows only one way to break, and that’s to shatter. In others, it’s diluted sufficiently, with enough fresh blood in each line, to summon the free will and courage to overcome all the darkness. So we must be strong, if only briefly, since only the strongest can overcome it.’

‘And that’s you, is it?’

‘Me?’ He laughed. ‘I’m an old fool. It has to be you.’ He reached for a drawer under the gurney and pulled it down with a crash that startled her. Surgical knives and instruments scattered about him, and he sifted for the longest scalpel, then showed the blade to her.

Aged and rusted. And black and white like a movie. Mira stumbled to her feet and edged further along the monochrome wall, hoping to outrun him.

He leapt to his feet and blocked her from the door with sharper agility. ‘That sedative will last for more than an hour, so the pain shall be mine alone to suffer.’ He turned over the scalpel and offered the handle to her. ‘When the time comes, you must open your veins; here.’ He demonstrated by swiping the back of the blade across his own wrist, without cutting himself. ‘You shall do this for me too, and spill our blood in this place where the sin of creating your line destroyed the real future.’

‘
My
line? If you’re the problem, why can’t the solution begin and end with you?’

‘I was born from an act of love, albeit forbidden. You were not. Exactly the opposite.’

‘Shows how much you know. My parents loved each other.’

‘I’m not talking about your parents. I’m talking about the lustful crime that created your mother, and as a consequence, you.’

‘We’re not responsible for your crime,’ she insisted. ‘I have enough guilt of my own, but I also have a new life with friends, and I’m here to save them so we can enjoy life together.’

‘Oh, sweet mother and matron! Girl, I only permitted you to develop friends because we needed them here. When you die they will still remember you, and all their suffering shall be washed away with our blood.’ He offered the blade to her again — his hands shaking, his lip quivering — but again she refused to take it, fearing a trick. One slick flick to her neck while her reflexes were dulled and his strike, if she let him draw so near, would be lethal.

‘We all die,’ she argued. ‘I’m not afraid, but I want to
live
first.’

‘Selfish girl! Like me, you never should have existed in the first place.’

Mira shook her head more determinedly. ‘You said you were born from love? How can anything be wrong about that in the long run, unless you make it that way?’

‘Its not so simple to explain as it is to deny. We were born outside the rules. Can’t you see? We can perceive crime through time, because evil knows its own face. Try as we might, we cannot avoid seeing the past or hearing the future, and every time we do, it’s the people we care about most who get hurt by the waves of repercussions. Have you never noticed how often you see the worst side of humanity when you look back through time? Tell me truthfully, are you naturally drawn to it?’

Mira wished she could argue, but everyone she knew had problems now because of her, and the nearer they grew to her, the more they suffered.

‘Do you think you’re alone?’ His expression revealed that he knew her pain better than anyone.

‘Please,’ she pleaded. ‘I just want to be free somewhere, and live in peace.’

‘Peace and freedom are costly, afforded by the things we’re prepared to sacrifice. It’s our loved ones we really wish to enjoy it. Our lives, in the scheme of things, become irrelevant.’ He offered the scalpel to her yet again, and yet again she refused to take it. ‘Can’t you see the perfect symmetry of ending your life in this place where your fork in the family tree was initially seeded?’

She cringed away, shunning him.